98 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
by the end of her journey she is so overcome by weariness that she faints, losing
‘her miserable consciousness and look[ing ] like a beautiful corpse’.^55 Th e walk
also subjects her to the pain of public scrutiny and social condemnation: she
‘take[s] no pains to conceal’ her pregnant fi gure and encounters the critical gaze
of others who comment on the fact that she is ‘not very fi t for travelling’.^56
Th is physical pain and social judgement is constitutive of the punishment
of the journey: if ‘the “wandering” woman literalises sexual transgression’ then
here the pain of wandering literalizes the punishment for that transgression.
Yet, while symbolically subjecting her heroine to a condemnation that adheres
to expected moral codes, the journey is also a key moment in subverting the
discourse of the fallen woman, operating to make visible a number of elements
about Hetty’s narrative that are signifi cant in how readers are asked to under-
stand her story. Hetty cannot be straightforwardly positioned as a sympathetic
fi gure and neither can her journey, as Parkins notes, be conceived of ‘as heroic
within the terms of the narrative, because it lacks the ethical agency that moti-
vates truly purposeful action’; but it does nonetheless draw out two aspects
of Hetty’s experience that are otherwise silenced from the text.^57 Th e arduous
labour of Hetty’s walking body stands in place of the labour of her baby at the
journey’s end that is unnarratable: the long, drawn-out bodily suff ering of her
wandering is the closest approximation of the experience of pregnancy and birth
that the text can articulate within the context of contemporary literary expecta-
tions.^58 Th e journey also stands in for a second journey that cannot be narrated
in the terms of the text: the transportation of Hetty to Australia, undoubtedly
another physically and emotionally arduous ordeal that is again beyond rep-
resentation. Th e journey thus operates to simultaneously fulfi l the discursive
expectations of the treatment of the fallen woman while making visible the pain
caused by the inequalities of gendered moral codes: as journey begets journey,
the narrative constantly intersects mobility and sexuality in such a way that it
comes to use a familiar discursive site of female sexuality – mobility – as instru-
mental in its critique.
In doing so, the journey also ruptures two elements of gendered rural represen-
tation. Hetty traverses a predominantly rural landscape and the focus throughout
is on the countryside as the space of travail: far from being an idealized environ-
ment, rural spaces present a harsh, hostile environment that is marked by the
diffi culties for the struggling traveller. Walking is here conceived of in terms of
labour – ‘what hard work it was to fi nd her way’ – drawing out the hardship of
necessary walking , and the landscape is depicted not for its picturesque qualities,
only in terms of how it relates to her traversal: Hetty is ‘always fi xing on some tree
or gate or projecting bush’, but never in terms of its scenic, picturesque qualities.^59
Furthermore, the strain that the walk puts on Hetty’s body – becoming ‘pale and
worn’, ‘weary’ and fatigued – marks a notable break from the implicit association